Blonde bombshells

Blonde has never really gone out of style, but if the current revival of interest in this increasingly (unnaturally) unusual hair pigmentation is anything to go by, the blonde is having yet another moment.

To coincide with the publication of On Blondes by Times critic Joanna Pitman, the National Portrait Gallery is staging an exhibition of British blondes from the Thirties to the present day in its bookshop space. From Barbara Windsor to Diana Windsor, via blondes as diverse as Margaret Thatcher and Patsy Kensit, the collection highlights some of the great blonde moments of the past 70 years. Blonde fans can buy the calendar Blondes, issued by the National Portrait Gallery, compiled from their extensive photographic archive.

Another contribution to the persistent iconisation of the blonde is the Blondes exhibition at the Getty Images Gallery.

Pitman herself gamely went blonde for research purposes for her book, and apparently found the experience enlightening in more senses than those provided by her new highlights. Perhaps she really did have more fun. Though the Blondes exhibition at the Getty Gallery emphasises the flimsiness of grouping subjects according to something so predictable as hair colour, the show is charming, certainly. Carole Lombard is shown with a rather obvious black cat by way of contrast, Marlene looks like Marlene, Grace Kelly looks like Grace Kelly. C.Z. Guest, who no one who is not an obsessive reader of American Vogue is really aware of, appears like a rather diminished Greek deity, a goddessette, dwarfed by a magnificent poolside folly. Marilyn Monroe's iconic status is apparently undisputed and here she is, predictably, looking blonde and Marilyn-like.

One moment of interest is provided by the consideration of whether or not the distinctly mousy Michael Caine deserves an inclusion, icon or not, in an exhibition devoted to Aryan charms, and Paul Newman in a dinner suit is easy on the eye, but no more so than the average Armani ad. Janet Leigh looks, well, blonde. And frankly we've all seen enough of Madonna. There are enough beautiful and accomplished photographs here to appeal to the connoisseur of the genre - Lana Turner is delicious as a Hollywood version of an Ingres Odalisque, and Ursula Andress looks pulchritudinous in all the appropriate places. The most compelling portrait is early film star Muriel Evans, who stares insouciantly at the viewer from beneath a halo of very obviously artificial golden curls, her angelically infantile hair belying the whorish artificiality of her meticulously made-up face. Blondeness has always provoked a conundrum of childish innocence and knowing seductiveness, and the portrait of Evans gestures towards why the blonde has been so persistently fascinating and troubling.

Is hair colour really a sufficiently unifying statement to justify the grouping together of so many diverse and individual personalities? There are undoubtedly interesting questions to be asked about the phenomenon of blondeness in European art, as a visit to the municipal gallery in Perugia, with its progression of dark-haired Byzantine Madonnas to the eclaircissement of its fair Flandersinfluenced Renaissance beauties, easily suggests. That blondeness exercises a peculiar and discrete fascination is undoubted, from Yeats's Maud to Capote's Holly Golightly, who is blonde in the book whatever Audrey fans may claim, and assembling a collection of more or less wellknown celebrity portraits based upon the fact that their crowning glories were on the right side of fair allows us to indulge that fascination. Perhaps Blondes tells us little about the role of blondeness as an aspect of culture, and even less about the personalities of the 'icons' it features. Unless one has a knowledge of Italian nouvelle vogue cinema, Anita Ekberg is just that blonde with the big boobs in the Fellini film everybody pretends to have reached the end of.

Not that I'm bitter, I'm a blonde myself. Do I therefore consider myself inherently more interesting than my duskier sisters? Of course not, and unless you are firmly persuaded that blonde is better, or have a genuine passion for superannuated European film stars, I'd recommend you see the Titian at the National too. He was a man who knew about hair colour, so much so that he had one named after him.